Epistemic Injustice

Epistemic Injustice explores the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice - injustice which consists in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. Miranda Fricker distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word; as in the case where the police do not believe someone because he is black. Hermeneutical injustice, by contrast, occurs when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. A central case of this sort of injustice is found in the example of a woman who suffers sexual harassment prior to the time when we acquired this critical concept, so that she cannot properly comprehend her own experience, let alone render it communicatively intelligible to others. In connection with each of these forms of epistemic injustice, Fricker develops the idea that our testimonial sensibility needs to incorporate a corrective, anti-prejudicial virtue that can be used to promote a more veridical and a more democratic epistemic practice. Epistemology as it has traditionally been pursued has been impoverished by the lack of any theoretical framework conducive to revealing the ethical and political aspects of our epistemic conduct. Epistemic Injustice shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be fruitfully and forcefully discussed.

In this elegant and ground-breaking work, Fricker names the phenomenon of epistemic injustice, and distinguishes two central forms of it, with their two corresponding remedies. As the title conveys, Fricker is working in the newly fertile borderland between theories of value and of knowledge. We are social creatures-something that tends to be forgotten by traditional analytic epistemology. We are also knowers-something that tends to be forgotten by power-obsessed postmodern theorizing. Fricker steers a careful passage between the Scylla of the one and the Charybdis of the other... The book is not only a wonderful, ambitious attempt to bring ethics and epistemology together in a way that has rarely been done before, it is also a beautiful, and powerful, attempt to name something that matters. What progress, to be able to name the enemy, be it sexual harassment or epistemic injustice!

Autorentext
Miranda Fricker is Reader in the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Klappentext

Epistemology as it has traditionally been pursued has been impoverished by the lack of any theoretical framework conducive to revealing the ethical and political aspects of our epistemic conduct. Miranda Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be fruitfully and forcefully discussed.

Inhalt

• Preface

• Introduction

• 1: Testimonial Injustice

• 2: Prejudice In The Credibility Economy

• 3: Towards A Virtue Epistemological Account of Testimony

• 4: The Virtue of Testimonial Justice

• 5: The Genealogy of Testimonial Justice

• 6: Original Significances: The Wrong Revisited

• 7: Hermeneutical Injustice

• Conclusion

• Index